


burning inside out

by preromantics



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Coping, Ensemble Cast, Feelings, Gen, Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-05-06
Packaged: 2018-06-06 17:13:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6762844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preromantics/pseuds/preromantics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To make sure Bucky can never be controlled again they must wipe everything. "Do it," he says.</p><p>Everyone helps in their own way. Steve doesn't cope well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	burning inside out

**Author's Note:**

> There shouldn't be any major spoilers for Civil War here! However, there are implied character choice spoilers.

"I've made up my mind," Bucky says. 

Steve knows if he looks up, stops staring into his coffee, he'll see the answer in Bucky's eyes. In the clench of his jaw, always stubborn. In the way his good arm is wrapped across his chest, hand gripping the stump of his shoulder in some approximation of the same fortitude set in the lines around his mouth.

"Please, Buck," Steve says. Everything about the way the words come out is a mirror of the coffee he's still staring into: dark, heavy, gritty under everything. 

"There could be another way," Steve says. Bucky answers in silence.

"You won't remember anything. You'll be a shell."

You won't remember me, Steve doesn't say. It burns white-hot in his chest, anyway.

More silence. Neither of them want to fight.

Steve stares at his coffee for too long. When he looks up, Bucky is gone and Steve's coffee is cold.

When Steve leaves the room, he leaves the mug shattered on the floor.

 

-

 

"Memories do not make a man," says Vision, solemn.

It is only Nat's hand on his shoulder that stops Steve from striking out.

She offers little comfort in the way of words. On the training mats, she offers multitudes. She swings hard at his face, twists her legs around his neck and flips him to the ground. She doesn't say anything, but offers a hand that slides to his shoulder and grips him tight before he lunges at her. 

"Do better," she challenges, a glint in her eye he can't refuse. 

He pins her to the mat and she knees him unrepentantly in the balls. 

Round two begins.

 

-

 

Erskine was right. The formula enhanced everything in Steve all those years ago. His morality, his conviction, his personal brand of stubbornness. 

His love for his best friend. His love for Bucky.

It threatens to consume him now. 

 

-

 

His forehead pressed to the frozen cryo chamber window, Steve keeps his eyes closed. Measures his breathing, glacially slow, to match the far too spread out dings of the heart rate monitor.

One beat. "I lost you once."

Two beats. "I'm not losing you now."

Three beats. "I refuse."

Four beats, finally lightheaded, overwhelmed. Oxygen or love, he doesn't know. "I love you, Buck."

 

-

 

"The man made up his mind," Tony says. 

"Fuck you," Steve spits. It burns inside his throat. 

Tony holds up his hands. "I don't pretend to understand," he starts.

"Then don't," Steve says. 

Hands still up, as if Steve is a wild animal to pacify, Tony narrows his eyes, not unkindly. There's always that look, times when Tony knows too much under all his bravado. "You love him," Tony says.

"He's my best friend," Steve says. "He's all I have left." His throat still burns.

"You love him," Tony repeats. He looks older than Steve has ever seen. With a visible swallow, Tony turns, hands falling to his side, and leaves Steve alone in the kitchen.

 

-

 

T'Challa has eyes that always seem too deep, like Steve could fall into them and find himself if he tried.

He knows why Steve comes to the cryo chamber. He personally lets him inside every time. 

Today he has a streak of blood from his hairline to his temple and pauses with his thumb inches from the door reader when he catches Steve's stare.

"Sometimes, Steve, we must make sacrifices for our people," he says. "A superficial scratch will heal. It may leave a scar, a reminder to your enemies that your sacrifices make you uninvincible. A mark on a soul will leave a true scar."

"I was never one for riddles," Steve says.

The silence of the cryo chamber room is welcoming. Steve counts his own breaths.

 

-

 

When Steve first finds out Bucky asked to go under until the procedure is final, right after their last one-sided conversation, he breaks every punching bag in the facility. His rage is primal. It rings in his ears. Sand from the bags sticks under his finger nails and his knuckles break over and over again.

It doesn't make him feel any better.

 

-

 

Everyone seems to disappear when Steve walks into a room at the Avengers facility these days.

Vision and Tony, heads bent together, look at him from across the room when he enters and quickly disperse.

"They are worried," Wanda says. 

"So everyone thinks I'm unstable now, is that it?" Steve says. 

Wanda shrugs. She looks so small, curled into the corner of the couch in an oversized sweater. Her power seems to radiate, still. It prickles at Steve's skin from feet away.

If he had her powers he would be an untouchable storm. 

"You are unstable," she says. "Is that not what loss does?"

He can't help the immediate and vivid memory of her brother that fills his vision, falling. 

"You have not suffered this loss yet," Wanda says. "Come, sit with me."

 

-

 

Steve gets his updates from Friday. A faceless voice is better than the pity or the challenge in everyone else's expressions.

"Barnes' procedure is scheduled for one week from today," she informs him.

He's sure Stark knows about the updates he's asked for. Steve is thankful that he stays out of it, for once.'

"The formula by Drs. Banner and Smyth has been tested and approved," Friday says. "Is there anything else I can update you on, Captain?"

Steve tugs his sheets into his fists and let's his too-fluffy pillow swallow up the painful scrunch of his face.

"Let me know if there is," says Friday after an appropriate amount of unresponsiveness.

 

-

 

Rhodey gives Steve less shit than he's entitled to.

Steve helps him through his therapy in the basement a few days a week and finds a kind of bitter relief in the guilt as well as the solitude of the therapy stations. 

Rhodes has recently started aquatic therapy and Steve walks along with him treading water with a hand a few inches from his back, ready to catch him if he falls.

"Friends don't let friends drown," Rhodey says. "Are you with me, man?"

Steve startles multiple times during their time in the pool the day before Bucky's procedure. The lapping of the pool water is like white noise to Steve's cluttered thoughts.

"Friends don't let friends drown," Steve repeats. 

Rhodey looks at him curiously for a moment, but it turns into a roll of his eyes.

"Look, Tony hasn't killed you yet, but he'd definitely kill you for failing to play lifeguard for my pathetic ass."

Steve snorts at that. "I've got your back."

The gentle sound of the water moving around them goes back to white noise, but his hand doesn't waver.

 

-

 

On the day of the procedure, Steve rides with Sam. 'What's Going On' plays them through their silent ride to DC.

Steve doesn't even like Marvin Gaye, but he still hasn't found the heart to tell Sam that.

The burn in his lungs and his throat and his chest challenges him to stab at the radio and bite out words he doesn't mean. 

If Sam notices, he says nothing. He taps out a beat on the steering wheel and hums. He's solid and steady beside Steve. 

Sam breaks their silence in the parking lot outside the hospital. "I'd ask how you're feeling," he says, "but you'd punch me, wouldn't you?"

"That would answer how I'm feeling right about now," Steve says.

Sam nods and matches Steve's hurried stride. "I'm gonna be right here, you know that?"

"I know, Sam."

 

-

 

Last night Steve slept in the room at the facility where they'd temporarily moved Bucky.

He slept sitting up, back against the cold metal hull of the chamber. The beeping keeping Bucky under, at his terrible - selfish, Steve's brain supplies - request, drilled into Steve's head like gunfire. 

Every few minutes he considered disregarding Bucky's wishes, the signature on release papers that consented to his procedure, the one thing breaking Steve into a million pieces. 

If he woke Bucky, maybe he could talk him out of this. Maybe he could convince him that his love would keep Bucky safe from mind control, from anyone who could ever come for Bucky.

And it would. Steve would lay down his life a thousand times over to see Bucky even smile.

He sleeps with his hand clutched around the disconnect cable and wakes with the dawn.

 

-

 

"You shouldn't watch," Tony says. 

"Can't you understand he needs to?" Sam says. 

"Shut up, both of you," Natasha snaps.

"I'm right here, guys," Steve says. Hollow.

From the viewing window Steve watches Bucky ice down and get transferred to the hospital bed while he's still unaware. He's immediately put under.

It's his last glimpse of his Bucky, Steve realizes. His hands crumble the drywall under the viewing window and he goes to sit a few feet back.

Tony is at the digital controls inside and Banner is across the glass. Vision is there, too, as well as a team of actual medical professionals who's names Steve will never care to learn. 

A metal cap is lowered onto Bucky's head, pulsing with unearthly blue light. 

Tony moves in the corner, mutters something, and the power cuts out entirely. "Damn, hold on," Tony says, and Steve can see nothing but the ghostly blue glow of the machine about to take away his Bucky.

He wants to burst through the glass and rip it off Bucky's head and run away with him.

The lights flicker back on before he can be so reckless. Bucky would never forgive him, anyway.

Nat is standing in front of him, eyes narrowed slightly like she knew what he may have been planning. She slides to the side after a second and sits next to him.

"I'm sorry, Steve," she says.

Her hand is conspicuously laid out on her thigh and he takes the gesture for what it is and clasps her hand in his. She holds his fingers tight and unwavering, just on the edge of painful. He's thankful for it.

Together, with Sam a steady presence behind him and Tony the apologetic orchestrater in the room, they watch science take away Steve's best friend.

The man he loves.

 

-

 

Bucky doesn't scream or shake or move at all. He looks peaceful. They aren't reconditioning him, they're saving him from ever being used again, and from the ghosts of his past.

He'll be a shell of a man, a painful memory Steve would never wish to be plucked from his own mind.

Steve will be damn sure no one will be able to mold him into a weapon this time, even if he burns his own soul and heart while doing so.

 

-

 

The end of the procedure is the worst. Bucky wakes and Bruce holds a clipboard against his crisp lab coat.

Steve stands so close to the glass partition his nose marks the window.

"How are you feeling?" Banner asks.

Steve holds his breath. 

Bucky blinks.

"Do you know who or where you are?" Banner asks next.

Not willing to subject himself to the answer, Steve turns on his heel and bolts. 

For hours he runs all the way back to New York.

 

-

 

No one bothers him. It's blissfully, terribly quiet.

Steve breaks everything in his room.

 

-

 

Tony's voice is the first he hears, an undetermined amount of days later.

"I know you don't want to come out, Cap," Tony says, voice muffled through the wall. "But we need you. You promised you'd always be available, remember?"

"A mission, Stark?" Steve's voice feels scratched up and rough from being unused and burnt by acid grief.

"Meet us in the tech wing. New stuff," Tony says.

Steve suits up and numbly follows the order.

 

-

 

Something seems off as he walks down the corridor. There's beeping. It's too silent for a team meeting. 

As he walks into the basement lab he freezes, all pain and shock. He barely registers Vision and Clint strong arming him in place.

Bucky is unconscious, hooked up to that horrible blue helmet, serenely laying on a bed in the middle of the room.

"You have five seconds," Steve says. He briefly registers that Sam and Nat are in the room with Banner and Tony.

Tony's hands are up again. "We wanted your permission," he says, talking quickly. "When the power went out at the hospital it wasn't an accident. Stand down. We extracted Bucky's memories, his brain if you will. Vision had the idea, based on - well, nevermind that -"

"We looked at it like a code," Vision cuts in. "The control was, say, a virus to be eliminated."

"Steve, listen," Nat says.

Steve feels himself shaking apart. They messed with Bucky's mind, they didn't ask for permission, they --

"We think we can... restore Barnes' memories," Bruce says. "It is untested, but we believe it will work."

"You make the call, Cap," Tony says.

Steve slumps against Clint and Vision's dual grip. "Do it," he says. 

 

-

 

The first thing Bucky does as he blinks into consciousness is sit up too fast and waver, sliding backwards.

Steve is at his side in an instant, hands on his arm and back.

Steve is aware in the back of his mind that everyone in the room is watching, collectively holding their breath. 

Bucky blinks at him, at the hand on his arm and back up. 

"Steve?"

The burn in Steve's throat, persistent for a month, doubles in intensity. "Yeah, Buck."

"Steve," Bucky repeats, blinking even faster. "Steve. I thought I lost you."

"Never," Steve says, choking on it, the burning in his throat and lungs and veins giving way to a burst of exhilarating warmth.

"Never," Steve says again, and buries his head in Bucky's neck with Bucky's arm wrapped tight around him, his warm palm spread out over Steve's face.

 

-

 

Everyone conveniently disappears from the facility. No one interrupts their walk upstairs and out to the ground hours later.

"Hey Buck," Steve says as he watches Bucky lift his head into the warmth of the sun, looking for the first time like a free man.

"I love you," Steve says.

"I know, you idiot," Bucky says quietly, face still tilted toward the sun, eyes closed and the corners of his mouth curling into a grin. It's a few frozen seconds before he turns back to Steve.

Steve tilts his face toward the sun, too, because Bucky reaches out to trace his cheek. His eyes are shut against the light, against the overwhelming thrum in his blood, as Bucky draws him closer.

"You, too," Bucky says, and he's so close Steve can feel the warmth of his breath against his lips. "Always have."

"Idiot," Steve agrees.

When their lips meet Steve feels finally free, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Clearly Civil War gave me 500000 feelings. Enough to jar me into writing fic again. I'm pleased. Emotionally overwhelmed, but pleased.


End file.
